


Easy Melancholia

by EverybodyKnowsIt



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ballet, Ballet Industry Meta, Bittersweet Ending, Brief Mention of Body Dysmorphia, Injury, M/M, Poetry, Second Person POV: because we're really out of fucks to give, but rather changes the relationship between the art and the artist, if there was a markhyuck angst olympics I would win, mild depression, or at least medal bronze, shows this fic to my thesis advisor: the commodification of art does not cheapen art itself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-16
Updated: 2020-01-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:15:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22276939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EverybodyKnowsIt/pseuds/EverybodyKnowsIt
Summary: "But people can die of loneliness, you know. Doctors call it skin-hunger. There’s a boy named Lee Minhyung (call me Mark) in your level, and you both bond through the way that Russian refuses to slip easy off your tongue."Through his art Donghyuck has been eviscerated, razed; embalmed, buried and laid to rest in the depths of the unknown once again.
Relationships: Brief Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Lee Jeno, Lee Donghyuck | Haechan/Mark Lee
Comments: 12
Kudos: 44





	Easy Melancholia

_Curtain Call: Jeju, South Korea. 2013._

You are thirteen, willow-limbed and lamb-skinned, when they tell you that the way your body moves and the beauty it produces could take you places, good places, wealthier places. 

(Later you learn that they mean North, that good places will always mean as far North and West as you can reach with scrabbling fingers.)

You are thirteen and unstoppable, unreckonable in your fervor to conquer heaven and become one of its stars, and the Bolshoi Ballet Company takes advantage of this, of your body: a body with no blood in its veins, not yet, only hunger and golden light.

Hunger: is a verb of transgression. 

Hunger: is a noun of desperation. 

It is the only thing you have ever known.

You were taught that every scar must end in a victory, and victory is beauty that is pristine enough to be sent across oceans.

You walk up tropical sun-warmed roads—slowly—as your ankles are muddy with bruises, to your grandmother’s estate and smile to the maid who lets you in. She is nameless to you, but with her downcast eyes it’s never mattered. Your grandmother sits you on her knee and you whisper the news into her ear like a secret. The word _Moscow_ awkwardly slow dances at the tip of your tongue, like children playing adult at prom, but you think you can get used to it. _Of course you made it_ , she murmurs, _you were born from beauty, my little sun._

She was wrong, you later learn. The ache in your joints when it rains, the pain blooming loud and lingering as a slurry of starling calls, the vacancy where childhood should have been, they tell you so. _You were not born from beauty but war_ , and sometimes you wonder if that’s really such a bad thing at all.

Firecracker boy. Stupid, 5-minute sparkler, cherry bomb boy.

You are so afraid of them and their hungry eyes, but nevertheless, your heart swells when they tell you that you deserve to bloom in front of the People’s eyes: prodigious son and pride of the nation. 

You died when you were thirteen. You died sun-blooded.

* * *

_Pas de Deux: Moscow, Russia. 2016._

You dance and dance and dance until it doesn’t mean anything anymore. 

Your tiny studio apartment in the heart of the Ramenki District is constantly flooded by the deep and ripe smell of coffee brewing, although it’s not enough, it never is. It’s not enough because your studio is three-hundred-thousand rubles a month, and every broken bone is priceless. Three-hundred-thousand divided by priceless is something you can’t afford, but you never saw the point of math when you could dance instead, and there’s no way to know if you’re wrong. 

There are only 206 bones in the human body, you tell yourself. You only have 206 bones to break, so you have to spend them wisely, and suddenly your art is pitted against time.

There’s not much in the way of friendship to be found in the Bolshoi Ballet, you and your fellow war-machines were never taught anything outside of the cold and critical love of your practice. There’s a word in Russian to describe young dancers like you, like them. You learn that it’s called тоска. The children who only know how to pointe-dance love songs and rip themselves to pieces, they’re filled with too much тоска. Anguish or yearning without rhyme nor reason, it loosely translates.

An easy melancholia, it loosely translates.

You cling to the currency of emptiness. You dance. It doesn’t get easier, but in lusting for a hungry patch of sunlight, why should it? 

But people can die of loneliness, you know. Doctors call it skin-hunger. There’s a boy named Lee Minhyung ( _call me Mark_ ) in your level, and you both bond through the way that Russian refuses to slip easy off your tongue. It’s something you could call friendship, but with the way he causes aching under your skin that for once isn’t from bruising, you call it dangerous, you call it nothing.

 _What are you?_ they ask, because it’s not art in the way they know it. _We’re two ends of the same string_ , Mark responds, a grin riding on the edges of his teeth and an arm thrown careless over your shoulder. The warmth of it makes you want to shiver, but you hold yourself steady, hold yourself firm. It’s the Russian winter, you tell yourself. Anything more than winter you can’t have.

You continue to practice and perform and get _better and better and better_ , and you are so afraid of them and their hungry eyes, but you are such a fool, because yours are the same.

 _I fucked up the audition for the Prince_ , you tell him bitterly one day, ripping sports tape off your blistered feet with vicious efficiency, _Swan Lake wants beauty and I didn’t deliver_.

 _You’re beautiful_ , Mark counters—looking decisively away with the shine of a flush on his cheeks—and you don’t know how to tell him that it doesn’t matter if you’re beautiful or hot or sexy if you look in the mirror and don’t even see a person anymore. Just ears and hair and gnashing mouth growing out of this bag of flesh and meat and bone and marrow. A Cubist painting of oil-slick fat and tremoring limbs instead of paint, sometimes that’s what you see. He wouldn’t call _Guernica_ sexy so why would he call you. You don’t understand and at times you think you never will.

Later you’re sitting on the floor after practice with him, sharing a Diet Coke between the two of you, sweat still blooming off your forehead and _heaving heaving heaving._

It’s a slow violence, this art and what it does to you. 

They have told you not to complain about the opportunities you’ve been given, but ceaseless _heaving_ feels like _dying_ , a _heaving_ that reduces you to fifty percent aspartame and fifty percent lactic acid simmering in your calves, and you think—pray—that Mark must know how you feel. You tell him this and he laughs, and he laughs like he dances—like he wants to tear apart the flesh of God—and he tells you _there are different kinds of death, Hyuckie, but one in service is the most beautiful of all._

Service, this is service. A body of only flesh is devoured over time, and this is service. 

You look at him piercing and near-critical, in the way you have been long-taught to drink in bodies, his cement posture and tendons pulsing under skin, and you think that maybe together the both of you can form the Garden of Eden once again.

You were only sixteen and silly, because no matter what Milton says, in this world—in this body—you can’t assert eternal providence nor _justifie the wayes of God to men._

You are nothing but a body globalized. 

It’s the midst of the season and you win a starring role, the _sleeping beauty_ , royalty drowning in his own destruction. The irony of it touches you gently. You make yourself up in the image others want to see, yourself included, take all the bad parts out, and make yourself into a martyr. The preparations for the performances are a byzantine nightmare; you don’t eat and you don’t sleep and you don’t even know if you dance, just that you are somehow, maybe, perhaps alive somewhere in this golden delirium.

 _I know you’re hurting_ , your teacher says. You are. You know how to ache, the beauty of it has been beaten into you from the feet up. _I know you’re hurting_ , your teacher says, and her eyes are tired and distant, _but it doesn’t matter._

As much as you try and as much as they tell you, you’re not a lark— your bones aren’t wings but lead-weights dragging you to the ground every time you leap. A second of error is a lifetime’s dread, and when you misjudge the angle of the landing you crumple like the paper marionette that you are. 

It’s pathetic, really.

There is bright, white, glistening pain as sharp as Mark’s smile. They tell you that you bit your tongue on the way down to the floor, but all you remember is the taste of pennies: money filling your mouth to the brim and all this vacant space where pain used to be. You close your eyes and there is nothing: nothing to see and nothing to hear and nothing left for you to give.

 _You silly, silly boy,_ they laugh. A body globalized isn’t a body at all.

* * *

_Finale: Seattle, Washington. 2018._

The only way to be free of the system is to rot within it.

Sylvia Plath once said: _eaten or rotten, I am all mouth_. It’s something like that. 

Mark doesn’t come to say goodbye when you come to take your things from your locker for the last time, but you don’t hold it against him. Mark holds more тоска in him than anybody you know, and you also know he thinks that what he can’t see can’t hurt him.

You move. 

In Seattle there is rain, too much of it, and a gray fog in your mind that you can’t shake. You ignore the dirty dishes piling in your sink and ride the city buses terminal to terminal, head lolling against crisp window-glass. Your grandmother calls, she begs you to _come home, my little sun, come home_ , and you don’t know how to tell her that you can’t bear to look at them and their hungry eyes now that yours aren’t the same. So you don’t, and eventually the calls stop coming.

You look at the phone in your hand, heavy, bone-cold, and wonder if your grandmother will be sated by the memory of you in your prime. 

Whose memory? 

Whose indeed.

You spend a lot of time sitting. In parks and in libraries and in tucked away corners of bakeries slouching on street corners. You have to remind yourself that you are allowed to eat, because no-one is here to tell you how your body must look to be seen as art. You spend all your time building yourself from the ground up, because you spent the first eighteen summers of your life selling pieces of flesh away.

You find a boy who speaks in the tongue of grief and hiding and sometimes even Korean, like you do. His name is Jeno, and you tell yourself that you’re in love with him, even when you wish you could find Mark’s sharp smile within his soft mouth. You think you’re going to marry him someday, even if he sometimes calls you _Jaemin_ in the middle of the night. But he was maybe a little too good at hiding, you found, and things never turned out that way. 

He whispered to you in the soft, still moments of sherbert sun-down, _stop this false grief— I’m telling you. Turn it out, hack it to pieces, bury it somewhere I can’t see it._ Your eyes weren’t human enough for his liking _,_ and you tell yourself that’s why he left you, not that maybe you are just _too_ human and that’s what he just couldn’t bear. 

It’s funny how children devote themselves to tragedy. How art breaks borders and then bodies. How you’re figuring out everything all over again.

Thus, all your time now spent healing.

**Author's Note:**

> brief disclaimer: I danced @ pnb and know Nothing about the Bolshoi... my knowledge of russian consists of one (1) drinking game my friend tried to teach me while inebriated. Please educate me i beg.
> 
> Otherwise: if you wanna chat, catch me @sidstarbursts


End file.
